Why I am a Multi-Cloud Skeptic

This is a very nuanced post. Apologies if I ramble a little initially, but I think it is essential to describe the nuance before going further.
I will start this off by saying, I am a skeptic of multi-cloud. In my experience as an architect, I have been in far too many shops where someone high up in the hierarchy says, "We are too reliant on X. Why don't we adopt a multi-cloud strategy?". And it is a very valid point. In its promise, multi-cloud offers a huge benefit. But the implementation is where things go downhill.

The Illusion of Cost Savings

The first argument I often hear for a multi-cloud strategy is cost optimization. The idea is that you can cherry-pick the cheapest services from each provider. While this sounds great on a whiteboard, the reality is far more complex and often more expensive.

First, you are now paying for duplicate infrastructure, even if it's just for disaster recovery or failover. You have to account for data transfer costs between clouds, which can be astronomical and are often overlooked in initial planning. Furthermore, you lose the volume discounts and committed-use savings you might have negotiated with a single provider. The engineering effort required to build and maintain an architecture that can seamlessly switch between clouds is significant, and that time is a very real cost.

Complexity is the Enemy of Reliability

Multi-cloud introduces a level of complexity that can quickly become a management nightmare. You are no longer just dealing with a single set of APIs, service limits, and a consistent networking model. Now, your engineers must be experts in at least two or three different ecosystems.

• Networking: How do you handle cross-cloud networking? VPNs? Direct Connect? Each provider has its own way of doing things, and stitching them together reliably is a monumental task.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): You now have to manage identities across multiple, disparate systems. While tools exist to federate this, it's another layer of complexity and a potential security risk.
• Application Logic: Your application code must be cloud-agnostic, or you've created tightly coupled dependencies on specific services from each cloud. This often leads to using the lowest common denominator of services, meaning you miss out on the rich, deeply integrated services that make each cloud platform so powerful (e.g., AWS's Lambda, Azure's Functions, or GCP's Cloud Run).

The more moving parts you have, the higher the chance of a failure. Troubleshooting issues becomes exponentially more difficult when you have to debug across different cloud providers, each with its own monitoring tools, logging formats, and support processes.

Vendor Management: The Hidden Cost

Another significant hurdle is vendor management. Instead of one or two key contacts, you now have a team managing relationships with multiple cloud providers. This can lead to:

• Conflicting Support: Who do you call when your application is down and you're not sure if the issue is with AWS or Azure? You're likely to get pointed back and forth between support teams, each claiming the problem is with the other provider.
• Contractual Overload: Negotiating contracts, managing service-level agreements (SLAs), and dealing with billing from multiple vendors is a significant administrative burden.
• Lack of Strategic Partnership: With a single cloud provider, you can build a deep, strategic relationship. You might get a dedicated technical account manager (TAM), access to preview features, or even help with architectural reviews. With a multi-cloud approach, you are just one of many customers, and it's hard to get that level of attention from any one provider.

Operations and Maintenance Treadmill

Finally, let's talk about the day-to-day operational costs. The promise of multi-cloud is resilience, but the reality is constant maintenance.

• Tooling: Your CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and security tools must now be configured to work across multiple clouds. This often means building custom integrations or buying expensive third-party tools.
• Skill Gaps: Keeping your team's skills sharp on multiple platforms is a continuous and expensive effort. You either have to hire separate teams for each cloud or invest heavily in training for your existing staff.
• Patching and Updates: Each cloud has its own cadence for service updates, security patches, and new feature rollouts. Keeping your infrastructure and applications up-to-date and compatible across all of them is a never-ending job.

In my experience, the operational complexity and the associated costs of a multi-cloud strategy often far outweigh the perceived benefits. The promise of resilience and cost savings often turns into a costly, complex, and frustrating exercise in managing a fleet of disparate systems.

A Better Way?

So, what's the alternative? If your goal is resilience, build a robust architecture within a single cloud provider, leveraging their global footprint and a well-architected framework.

The promise of multi-cloud is seductive, but the reality is a significant increase in cost, complexity, and operational overhead. It's a strategy that looks good on a PowerPoint slide but is a nightmare to execute in practice.